DUSHANBE, January 8, 2013, Asia-Plus — The 10th grade student from Tojikobod (Rasht Valley), Sulaymon Akhtam, has won the republic Shahnameh reciting contest, which was organized by the Tajik national TV channel, Shabaki Avval (Channel One).
The eight-year-old Sodiq Nematov from Danghara (Khatlon province) took the second place and the 7th grade student from Dushanbe, Hasan Rajabov, was the third in the contest.
“In all, 280 people aged 6 to 30 from many regions of the country participated in the contest and only twelve persons reached the final round,” the source said.
According to him, the main objective of the contest was in raising people’s awareness of history and culture of the Tajik people.
The Shahnameh (“The Book of Kings”) is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 AD and is the national epic of Iran and related societies. Consisting of some 60,000 verses, the Shahnameh tells mainly the mythical and to some extent the historical past of (Greater) Iran from the creation of the world until the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century.
The work is of central importance in Persian culture, regarded as a literary masterpiece, and definitive of ethno-national cultural identity of Iran. It is also important to the contemporary adherents of Zoroastrianism, in that it traces the historical links between the beginnings of the religion with the death of the last Zoroastrian ruler of Persia during the Muslim conquest.
